Jem Finer

Longplayer

A one thousand year long musical composition: it began playing at midnight on 31 December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again.

The work, Longplayer, was composed for singing bowls — an ancient type of standing bell — which can be played by both humans and machines, and whose resonances can be very accurately reproduced in recorded form. As such, the work is designed to be adaptable to unforeseeable changes in its technological and social environments, and to endure in the long term as a self-sustaining institution.

However, the artist, Jem Finer, explains that the preoccupations that led to Longplayer’s conception were not of a musical nature; they concerned time, as it is experienced and as it is understood from the perspectives of philosophy, physics and cosmology.

It occurred to me that to make a piece of music exactly 1000 years long not only solved the problem of how to “make” time, but added another dimension to the idea by opening up questions about music and sound, composition and duration. The simple idea that popped into my mind, “write a 1000 year long piece of music,” demanded solutions to an ever expanding range of questions; how to deal with changing cultural perceptions of music, how to listen to music too long to hear completely, where to place it, what technology to base it on, how to make it available to the public… and perhaps most importantly, how to plan for its survival.

Longplayer can be heard in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, where it has been playing since it began, as well as in various listening posts around the world and globally via a live stream online.

Listen now

Listen now

Longplayer has always served to remind us of times we cannot imagine. In this moment, the Longplayer app also makes us question our relationship to the gadgets we carry around with us. While most of us delete and download new tools as we upgrade, an app for a thousand years provides a still point at the centre of the digital universe. – James Bridle, The Guardian

Longplayer is a concept, the way it can be experienced by contemporary audiences must perpeually shift with the times. Its original form was a computer programme, generating the piece in real time; at the moment, you can also listen via an app, but future speculative formats include mechanical machines designed to play the work if the computers that play it at current ever become obsolete.

iPhone/iPad

This app requires no data connection and automatically synchronises itself with every other copy of the app across the globe. With this app you become part of a community of listeners distributed through space and time, across many lifetimes.

Desktop computer

To listen to Longplayer, live-streamed from Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, London E14, download the m3u file above and then open in your media player (for example iTunes). Note: If your browser is Safari, this download may open a new page in your browser and play in the background.

2.

If your media player enables open streams, copy and paste this link – http://stream.spc.org:8008/longplayer – to play the stream. Open Stream is under the File menu in iTunes.

How Longplayer Works

How Longplayer Works

The composition of Longplayer results from the application of simple and precise rules to six short pieces of music. Six sections from these pieces – one from each – are playing simultaneously at all times. Longplayer chooses and combines these sections in such a way that no combination is repeated until exactly one thousand years has passed. At this point the composition arrives back at the point at which it first started. In effect Longplayer is an infinite piece of music repeating every thousand years – a millennial loop.

Audio: Longplayer Conversations

The Longplayer Conversations

Each year, as a way of celebrating the vision behind Longplayer’s long term aspirations, Artangel and The Longplayer Trust invite a leading cultural thinker to conduct a public conversation with someone they have never met, and to engage in a discussion inspired by the philosophical premise of a project which unfolds, in real time, over the course of a millennium.

The inaugural Longplayer Conversation took place in 2005 between New York artist and musician Laurie Anderson and Nobel prize-winning author Doris Lessing. Since then, meetings between two thinkers have continued to take place in the context of Jem Finer's one thousand year long musical composition.

Video: Brian Eno and David Graeber

Video: Brian Eno and David Graeber

This conversation took place 7pm, Tuesday 7 October 2014 at the Royal Geographical Society, London SW7.

Audience Q&A

Artangel invited members of the audience to ask Eno and Graeber questions after the event via e-mail or social media. A selected number of those were answered and responses can be read in full here.

Q. Would love to hear any thoughts you might have on how we can create more "non-bullshit jobs".
– from @joe_shreeve, via Twitter

A. (Brian Eno) Give people more time to invent them! Reduce working hours all round and people will start finding ways of filling their 'spare' time – and some of those ways they find will turn out to be of real value to themselves and to other people too. Most people don't want to sit in a sofa all day watching daytime TV: people like doing things that are useful or fun or joyful or exciting – if they're ever given the chance.

A. (David Graeber) I totally agree with Brian on this one. I always use the example of prisons. Even in minimum security prisons where people are fairly comfortable, they use work as a reward: if you don’t behave, we’ll take away your work privileges. If there was ever proof that people don’t want to just be fed and sheltered and sit around all day that’s it (especially when you consider these aren’t a collection of the most public-spirited people in the world.) The question is, what system is likely to come up with a better idea of what you have to contribute to the world: the “market”, or letting everyone decide for themselves. You might say the latter might lead to a lot of people spending their lives on silly or useless projects, but at least they’re almost certain to be more interesting silly or useless projects than all those bullshit jobs the market has produced.

Audio: Artangel Podcast 1

Artangel Podcast 1: A decade, a lighthouse, a protest, a barber's

Part one of the first ever Artangel Podcast recorded on the 10 year mark of the projects duration on December 31st 2009 when the 1000-year long piece of music reached the 1% mark.

Speaking from the Longplayers original listening post at Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse, Jem Finer reflects on the origins, meaning and future of the composition. In September of that year he oversaw its transformation from an automated algorithm to a 1000-minute live performance: this feature includes excerpts from The Long Conversation, the epic 12-hour relay debate that accompanied this event. The excerpted speakers are Jeanette Winterson, Mark Miodownik, Sophie Fiennes, Daniel Glaser, Susie Orbach and Andrew Kotting.

Writing: Longplayer Letters: Volume I

By a statistical argument, had nature not produced thin-tailed variations, we would not be here today. One in the trillions, perhaps the trillions of trillions, of variations would have terminated life on the planet. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb to Stewart Brand

Longplayer Letters: Volume I

Ideology and ghost stories are timeless. What I'm proposing is the difference between fiction and nonfiction, between imagination and reporting. — Stewart Brand to Esther Dyson

Read a chain of written correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. Unfolding slowly over time, the Artangel Longplayer Letters are forming a written conversation in which each conversant is both answering his or her predecessor and thinking toward his or her successor.

Longplayer Live 2009

Longplayer Live 2009

On 12 September 2009, to mark Longplayer's 10th anniversary, The Longplayer Trust presented Longplayer Live: a live performance of a 1000-minute section from Longplayer's 1000-year duration. Artangel presented a twelve-hour talking marathon involving twenty cultural figures. Both events took place at The Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London

Based on a graphical score that describes a deceptively simple system of advancing loops of which Longplayer is composed, a relay team of performers, six at any one time, played a twenty-five-metre-wide instrument made up of six concentric circular tables holding 234 precisely tuned Tibetan Singing Bowls.

Press

Selected Press

Beneath Longplayer’s simplicity lies something more complex. […] It also raises questions. For instance – why have we been duped into thinking that the new millennium’s all about one wild night? But Finer’s Longplayer is no protest against short-termism. — The Herald, 2 December 1999

The intention [of Longplayer] is that its droning and parping will, like this year’s eclipse, make the hearers ponder the passing of time in a way that makes you feel both mortal and insignificant. — The Evening Standard, Going Out, 30 December 1999

If infinity anxiety spawned the piece, it is performative anxiety that is now driving Finer. What if there were a power cut? What if there were a war or a natural disaster? What if the computer crashes? […] Longplayer mocks the temporary and limited zones of the Millennium Experience. It marks time like a sonic Stonehenge. There’s no real rush to catch it, it will outlive you, but listening to it in that lighthouse somehow makes you a part of its determined beam of sound. ‘The air is full of sound information,’ says Finer, ‘from the radio waves of mobile phones to an exploding star. I like the fact that its all going on around us. The fact that this piece just exists is reassuring.’ — Mark Espiner, The Guardian, 24 May 2000

Longplayer is […] more like a soundscape, or a piece of installation art, than a conventional piece of music. You can never experience it all. It will outlive you. If you listen to a fragment of it, you can but imagine the rest: the unknowable, ineluctable expanse of time stretching before you. — Charlotte Higgins, The Guardian Weekend, 9 September 2000

Writing: Longplayer Letters : Volume II

My hunch is this: that Eternalism, the long-player’s ultimate longplay, is located in residues of sleep, in the community of sleepers, between worlds, beyond mortality. I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep. — Iain Sinclair to Alan Moore

Longplayer Letters: Volume II

I’ve been thinking lately about the relationship between art and the artist, and I keep coming back to that Escher image of two hands, each holding a pencil, each sketching and creating the other (EscherSketch?). Yes, on a straightforward material level we are creating our art – our writing, our music, our comedy – but at the same time, in that a creator is modified by any significant work that they bring into being, the art is also altering and creating us. — Alan Moore to Stewart Lee

Read a chain of written correspondence on the subject of long-term thinking. Unfolding slowly over time, the Artangel Longplayer Letters are forming a written conversation in which each conversant is both answering his or her predecessor and thinking toward his or her successor.

About Jem Finer

Jem Finer

Jem Finer is an artist, musician, mathematician and award-winning composer whose works include Score for Hole in the Ground, in which underground falling water plays on hidden percussive instruments; Landscope, an inverted pylon that detected storms on Jupiter, and The Centre of the Universe, a spiral tower that ‘listened’ to the cosmos. Finer was also a founding member of The Pogues.